Charlottesville NC 2017

I just can't imagine what it's like to be a person of color in America in 2017.

In 2008, you saw Barack Obama get elected president of the United States of America.

I don't know about you, but I thought maybe we'd really turned a corner. Maybe things were truly getting better. Maybe,just maybe, things had actually changed.

Then I watched, mouth agape, utterly dumbfounded as the people I know and love lost their ever-loving minds. The response to that N* in the white house (a phrase I heard more than once) was visceral. White people were terrified. They started believing anything, no matter how outrageous and silly, about him and about blacks in general. Death panels. Kenya. Muslim. Gov't takeover of this and of that. I didn't even know how to argue most of the time, because it was just so completely crazy.

Fast forward to 2016. In a fit of backlash, We The People elect to the highest office in the land a reality TV star who was the first man to put a strip club in a casino and is famous for not paying people the money he owes them, because we wanted a thug to throw out those Mexicans and "restore law and order" to those blacks. 

If it had been a movie plot I would have thought it too unrealistic. I just don't even have words.

And then *they* start crawling out from under their rocks. The "alt-right". They feel empowered. They feel that he is one of them, and that the pendulum of power in America has turned back towards them. They won the election. They have the power.

Every ounce of this is the doing of *MY* people: rural, white, Evangelical Christian people.

I am ashamed.